You proved my principle: Quality and depth-of-selection brings in subscribers and keeps them. Once subscribed, one may use the TV audience model where ppl will watch the "least worst" show or movie available.

This new policy will cap their subscriber numbers, as those who leave will be replaced, more or less, only by those newcomers who will be attracted by fewer and lower-rated movies.

While I agree with your conclusions, there is an important fact you ignore: PCs now have less than 50% of the internet market in general, and I suspect smartphones and other devices' share will only grow in future, considering the slowing sales of PC and the increasing penetration of alternate gaming platforms. MS doesn't seem to see a way to stem the flow from computers to other devices, so they are maximizing their profits for the short term.

MS has a habit of showing their hand -- remember when they sold Windows subscriptions to businesses when there were no OS upgrades for years between 2000 and the disaster called Vista?

MS in, is a way, in the same bind they put Sun, et al. in a decade ago: they are now the de facto business platform, and they want to leverage that, even at the expense of their future PC personal software. There is much more cash in selling licenses to businesses than delivering OSes to manufacturers at bulk prices which were sometimes nearly free.

MS is a mature monopoly which does not see any competitors on the horizon -- except for phones and consoles. Otherwise, they would act differently. They know what they''re doing and they expect their PC customers mostly not to care.

The difference is subtler nowadays, but the act is exactly the same: libel is the widespread form of slander; IANAL but I have some experience in talking to lawyers about this as I spent twenty years as a broadcast journalist. If it is printed, broadcast, webcasted, shouted from rooftops or in public assemblies, or otherwise widely distributed, the harm is far greater than if it is simply spoken to individuals. Kinda like the difference between misdemeanor theft and felony grand theft.

I would have written "you can't libel a dead man," but that was not the maxim I learned.

So...No Libel Suit

You're right, texting isn't as fast or accurate as typing, but I think you got the numbers wrong.

Near the turn of the millennium, speech recognition software (ViaVoice, etc,.) achieved a claimed 99% accuracy. So I tried it out. After training, I got over 95% by speaking carefully (and slowly). The problem was finding and fixing those 05% mistakes took longer than typing the whole document over would have taken.

And yeah, most touch typists can't get more than 35 wpm and touch screens are worse, so the deck is stacked to an extent.

While your examples could be simple aggressive behavior in cat culture, they are amusing.

However, cats indeed use symbolic reasoning. Mine, a mature shelter animal when I got her, loved to play with a boot lace tied off with feathers which I "flew" near her until she realiized it was only a toy controlled by me, at which time she lost interest and did not play anymore.

However, when she wants my company, she fetches the feathered lace and brings it to me. She does not want to play with it -- she uses it as a symbol to say she wants some face time at the places she hangs out in (the porch or the back room with the sunny exposure.)

Am I surprised? At first I was, but it looks like Noam Chomsky was right -- we (many creatures) are "hard-wired" for language.

Wow! Who would have thought increasing the brightness and/or contrast of an LED screen would use more energy and make the power-saving measurement certification mode unusable?

OTOH, turning the screen off during video playback seems a little VW/Mitsubishi/Hyundai-like.

Read the Digital Millenium Communications Act (US)(1998); I was amazed when I read the document as passed; I remember understanding it required "secure" hardware and software for playback of HD (1080p) content, disallowing VGA connection to such sources. HDMI was the industry's first solution; Secure Boot (EFI) the next and now....this.

Wow! Exactly what I've learned in fifty years of audio/broadcast production. I wish I had written it; I certainly wanted to.

I would give the speakers/headphones more emphasis, however. No matter how expensive your rig is, speakers as good will be more. Much more. Including the speakers (especially cheaply-made and poorly designed) in the system evasluation gives an edge to the way bipolar transistors handle transients or square waves. A high power-to-cone mass speaker will follow the sharply cut off curve of a transistor well enough to make a listener's ears bleed, that's true, but a low power-to cone mass cheapie will not; its physics actually complements the transistor's characteristics by not following its sharp peak, but taking its lazy time returning to its accurate excursion limit. In effect, a cheap speaker "smooths' the spikey output of an overdriven bipolar transistor or IC.

But wait, there's more! Psychology is the number one influence. We like what we are used to hearing. We get used to good audio over time, and we become more selective. Or, if we have only heard distortion all our lives, we get to miss bad production if it is absent.

Was their 120 20 per cent better than the 100?

Was their Twin Six twice as good as their plain six?

Is the AMD FX8350 twice anything of the FX4175?

What's your point?

Which code (law scheme) are you talking about? Being in the Navy, the sailor in question was under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the rules of which are very different than for private citizens. For example, the US Constitution does not apply, except when the Supreme Court intervenes, which is rarely.

Even as Secretary of State, Ms. Clinton was a private citizen, under different laws.

I mean, of course, the leagues and playoffs. Basketball and baseball were the main beneficiaries of this movement, with local semi-pro play a reward for small-towners, but hockey and football also benefited at the national level.

In the 19th Century, a group of women who were anti-alcohol bc their husbands spend their paychecks at the bar instead of bringing it straight home first invented organized sports as something else to do. They were so successful at it they went on to found the Women's Christian Temperance Union to ban alcohol in bars and everywhere else completely. This passed into our constitution, of course, but had to be repealed later, as it did not increase the relief from boredom.

Any insightful psychologist would have warned against positive expectations for this plan bc they would understand that simple boredom lies at the root of most societally problematic behaviors, including risky sex. Give them not lectures nor surrogate babies (after all, didn't Japanese companies sell a lot of dolls and video games about constantly caring for something?) but something else to fill the time.

No, not Midnight Basketball...

And, no, not coding, either.

might have been boors, but were never bores.